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Saturday, September 10, 2016

Updated 9/11/2016 Added reader letter at the bottom of the article. - Terran

In IT I learned the that even with the brightest minds, there's things you cannot plan for, or even expect to happen, and stuff goes wrong. When computer systems crashed in the Airlines, (at least before they outsourced that kind of thing to India), we had a thing called a "post mortem" process ... morbid name to be sure, but it was kind of an impartial autopsy of a system and what went wrong ABSENT BLAME, for any particulars. Didn't matter who did it, what mattered was HOW TO FIX IT and fix it in a way so that it never happens again! A simple programmer typo can go undetected for years, until the right condition occurs, and bam! Flights grounded around the world.

Politicians and preachers deal in the blame game, and they do borrow each others toolboxes more than you would think. I remember reading once a story about the training of CIA agents, and that when they got caught in a foreign land that one of the tactics was to accuse other people of anything and everything to deflect attention from themselves. There's some quirk in human nature that automatically thinks an accuser is blameless. But point a finger and you got three pointing right back at you! Zealots are usually the worst of the lot. Anyone who has spent anytime in organized religion knows the preacher is always preaching about his own sins or to hide them by preaching against them. And the zealot mills of the middle east are churning out a frenzy of violence in the name of a god.

The political scoundrel always drapes themselves in the flag, and blame some usual third party. The usual suspects you know... because well... they are "not us". There's an old joke, the Lone Ranger says to Tonto, "Tonto we are surrounded by savages what will we do?" Tonto replies "What do you mean WE kimosabe?"